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Moves by German politicians to undo Munich’s decade experiment in open source are unnecessary, according to the bloke in charge of the project.

There are moves to replace the Linux based systems at Munich after a decade of it being the poster-child for open sauce operating systems. Munich’s ruling SPD-CSU coalition is apparently a fan of phasing out the use of open-source software.

Last month, the general council backed a proposal that the administration should investigate how long it will take and how much it will cost to build a Windows 10 client. Once it has that information the council will vote to replace LiMux the custom version of Ubuntu which the council has been developing.

THE HEAD OF IT at the City of Munich’s IT services provider [email protected], Karl-Heinz Schneider, has claimed that there are no “compelling technical reasons” for the authority to order a migration back to Windows.

Last month, Munich voted to investigate the viability of creating a Windows 10 client, thus ending its multi-million euro, nine-year experiment in running the municipality on Linux.

Schneider, who heads up the company responsible for Munich’s desktop Linux implementation, has spoken out about the move during an interview with German IT publication Heise.de.

Last month, the corridors of open source world were filled with whispers of Munich ditching Linux and making a switch to the closed world of Windows. The reports weren’t a product of someone’s imagination as the city voted to investigate the viability of adoption of Windows.

March 14 (3/14) is a day for celebrating the mathematical constant of pi, which starts with the digits 3.14. But the numbering coincidence isn’t the only reason to recognize this day. Join us as we stroll through history to revisit auspicious events that happened on Pi Days past.

Desktop

Minifree Ltd.—doing business as “Ministry of Freedom”—exists mainly for reasons Linuxers will like: to make it easier for people to get computers that respect their freedom and privacy, and to provide funding for a meaningful project, called Libreboot.

Minifree describes Libreboot as a free (libre) and open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement that offers faster boot speeds, better security and many advanced features compared to most proprietary boot firmware.

The choice of a new laptop for many consumers is still seen as the head-to-head comparison of Microsoft’s Windows 10 or Apple’s macOS. The third option of moving to a Linux-powered machine has always been a much trickier prospect. A dizzying range of Linux “flavors” coupled with the mysteries of hardware support stops many adept users from making the switch. What if you had an off-the-shelf approach to Linux hardware that just worked?

The driver, listed as “Microsoft — WPD — 2/22/2016 12:00:00 AM — 5.2.5326.4762,” wasn’t accompanied by any details, although we knew from the name that it related to Windows Portable Devices and affected users who had phones and tablets connected to the OS.

While the driver was an optional update for Windows 7 and 8.1 users, it was installed automatically for those on Windows 10.

A UK-based retailer Entroware now specializes in Ubuntu Linux-based computing solutions and services for those transitioning to Linux minus the hassle of setting up, thereby offering professionals another alternative to the MacBook Pro. The desktop environment is different from MacOS or even Windows but shares 95 percent similarity that makes the transition to Ubuntu easy.

Linux users and fans of Ubuntu are probably quite familiar with the PC machines of System76. The company’s machines come with Ubuntu pre-installed but are also flexible enough to handle Linux distros like Fedora, Mint or others without a problem. In addition to these highly flexible characteristics, System76’s machines deliver some great specs, potential specs upgrades and great usability overall.

Server

While the future of HPC will involve myriad different technologies, one thing is clear – the future of HPC involves a considerably greater degree of parallelism than we are seeing today. A large driver for this increased parallelism is the use of increasingly parallel processors and accelerator technologies such as Intel’s Knights Landing and Nvidia’s GPUs.

After months of architecture, coding and test we have released version 2.1.1 of the Intel® Clear Containers offering. This is a major release with some features we believe anyone wishing to use containers will be excited about!

Kernel Space

With the release of its Ryzen 7 series CPUs, AMD came out swinging at Intel’s high-end Core i7 line. As I noted in a previous column, version 4.10 of the Linux kernel corrects an issue that kept Intel CPUs from reaching their turbo speeds, but there’s also something in the new kernel for Team Red.

Linux kernel developers have again given Linus Torvalds cause for complaint.

The Linux Lord felt the need to take to the Linux Kernel Mailing List late last week to tell a chap called Wolfram Sang that “If you cannot explain a reason for a merge or be bothered to try to write a commit message, you shouldn’t be doing that merge. It really is that simple.”

Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the immediate availability of the second point release to the Linux 4.10 kernel, urging users to update their systems as soon as possible.

Coming exactly two weeks after the release of the Linux kernel 4.10.1 maintenance update, Linux kernel 4.10.2 is a major update that changes a total of 174 files, with 1929 insertion and 1010 deletions. Most of these changes are updates to various drivers, but we can also notice various architecture and filesystem improvements, as well as updated networking and sound stacks.

After announcing the release of Linux 4.10.2, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of new maintenance updates to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 and 4.9 kernel series.

Linux kernels 4.9.14 LTS and 4.4.53 LTS are now available for users of GNU/Linux distributions that are powered by a kernel from these stable, long-term supported branches. They come about two weeks after their previous builds, namely Linux kernel 4.9.13 LTS and Linux kernel 4.4.52 LTS, and bring quite a number of improvements for various components.

OPNFV, an integrated open platform for facilitating network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments, recently had a chance to participate in the first ETSI NFV Plugtests, held Jan. 23 to Feb. 3 in Madrid, Spain. Designed to perform interoperability testing among different telco vendors and open source providers, the event brought together a diverse group of industry representatives—including those from several open source organizations—ready to get their hands dirty and dive into interoperability testing. Participation in these types of test sessions, particularly in conjunction with others organizational players in the ecosystem (in this case, ETSI), shows that via greater interoperability, OPNFV is ready for complex deployments that ultimately bring the industry closer to a truly plug-and-play, end-to-end virtual network.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, announces Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has become a Gold member of the foundation.

When the Vulkan 1.0 API specification was unveiled last February, we were originally told by Canonical that Mir in Ubuntu 16.04 would have Vulkan support but now one year later, Mir in Ubuntu 17.04 doesn’t even look like it will have Vulkan support. But at least progress is being made.

With the recent Wayland 1.13 release, the Weston reference compositor broke tradition of being the same version as Wayland due to having ABI breakage that forced them to bump the version to 2.0. With the next release, it won’t be Weston 2.1 but now Weston 3.0 due to additional ABI breaks for libweston.

Pekka Paalanen is already prepping the Weston development version from 2.0.90 to 2.99.90 with the next version being 3.0. Pekka commented, “We have merged a few patches already that change libweston/compositor.h. While most of the changes arguably change only things libweston users should not be touching, some change the size of e.g. struct weston_output and struct weston_compositor, possibly moving member offsets. We also haven’t separated public and private parts from compositor.h yet. To be on the safe side, bump the major now. I’m sure there will be more changes that make the bump obviously necessary.”

Eric Anholt has written a status update concerning his latest work at Broadcom on the VC4 Gallium3D graphics driver that’s mostly focused on providing a free software graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi.

Benchmarks

I’m working on an AMD Ryzen Linux distribution benchmark comparison and will have those results to publish soon using a Ryzen 7 1800X. One of the interesting distributions I was curious about its Ryzen performance with was Intel’s Clear Linux distribution. It turns out it runs and there are scenarios of it having better performance than Ubuntu.

Last week we got to tell you all about the new NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with its custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs, four Cortex-A57 cores, and Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores. Today the Jetson TX2 is shipping and the embargo has expired for sharing performance metrics on the JTX2.

Applications

Open source animated screen recorder app Peek has hit version 1.0 — and added major new features to celebrate. Screen captures can be exported as animated GIFs, but Peek 1.0 adds WebM and MP4 exporting to the mix, making it a fully-fledged rival to other desktop screen recording apps like Green Recorder and Simple Screen Recorder.

Weblate is growing quite well in last months, but sometimes its development is really driven by people who complain instead of following some roadmap with higher goals. I think it’s time to change it at least a little bit. In order to get broader feedback I’ve sent out short survey to active project owners in Hosted Weblate week ago.

I’ve decided to target at smaller audience for now, though publicly open survey might follow later (but it’s always harder to evaluate feedback across different user groups).

I’ve been using claws-mail to both read/compose emails and to read all the vast pile of RSS feeds I try and keep up with for quite a while now and it’s for the most part been fine. I never liked claws-mail use of mh folders instead of something more standard like Maildir, and it’s calendar integration is… not there, but it did a pretty good job.

Unfortunately, claws-mail uses a plugin called ‘fancy’ to render html (which sees heavy use when loading rss feeds). This plugin uses the old old webkit1 (webkitgtk package in Fedora). This package hasn’t been maintained upstream in quite a long while and the number of vulnerabilities in it has just grown and grown. Other distros have dropped it entirely, and Fedora is finally following suit very soon. This has caused the Fedora claws-mail maintainers to drop the fancy plugin to prevent dropping claws-mail entirely. However, without that plugin, RSS reading is… not very pretty.

Rambox is a free messaging and emailing app created using Electron which is composed of various popular web applications to provide users with the ability to add as many web services as are supported in the same place and to use multiple accounts by way of duplicate apps.

I’ve released man-pages-4.10. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from over 40 contributors. This release sees a large number of changes: a record 600 commits changing around 160 pages. The changes include the addition 11 pages, significant rewrites of 3 other pages, and enhancements to many other pages.

CentOS 7 is a Linux distribution targeted for enterprise use and is kind of like the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can grab a copy of it from the official website. I’m gonna write specifically about installing the CentOS minimal edition.

Games

Guild Software has published this past week three updates to their popular and multi-platform Vendetta Online MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) title, which bring many improvements across all supported platforms.

The Vendetta Online 1.8.410, 1.8.411, and 1.8.412 updates have been released since our previous report, and they introduce quite a bunch of things. We’ll start with the 1.8.410 build as it’s the largest, introducing the ability for TempKoS players to collect faction losses for a certain faction during the entire TempKoS period.

As reported earlier, Keith Packard is Valve’s latest driver developer hire for bettering the Linux display stack for gaming, and in particular, VR. Keith has now shared a few comments on his new endeavor.

Arma: Cold War Assault [Steam] is now available for Linux & Mac, but it does not support Steamplay with the Windows version. So Steam now has a Windows version and then an entirely separate store entry for the Linux/Mac version.

The open-source Godot game engine continues working towards their 3.0 major release.

Godot developers have published a fresh progress report concerning their latest 3.0 developments.

Godot 3.0 is seeing rewritten import and export workflow handling as their latest accomplishment. Also interesting is they mention a new exporter is being developed for exporting Godot games to WebAssembly and WebGL 2.0.

STRAFE [Steam, Kickstarter] looks fantastic as an FPS and a throwback to some retro shooters, but sadly it has seen a delay. I reached out to the publisher Devolver Digital to ask about the Linux release as it wasn’t mentioned in the announcement.

Doing my usual perusing of SteamDB while something is uploading or compiling I came across Fossil Echo [Steam]. A game that was supposed to be on Linux quite some time ago, but it looks like it’s finally happening.

Black Mesa is a commercial fan remake of Half-Life and is developed by Crowbar Collective, a company that was formed around the Black Mesa project. Black Mesa follows the very same events as Half-Life and puts you in the role of Gordon Freeman during a catastrophe caused by a science experiment gone wrong. The Black Mesa research facility is being overrun by inter-dimensional aliens and the US military is about to “correct” the situation. You, naturally, are caught in the crossfire.

Polyball [Steam] is quite a weird game to describe really, as you’re just controlling a ball and racing along platforms across various levels. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually pretty fun.

The developers have taken inspiration from games such as Super Monkey Ball, Marble Madness and Sonic. That pulled my interest in as someone who loves Sonic and I have fond memories of Super Monkey Ball.

Planet Nomads [Official Site], the once promising sci-fi sandbox survival game is planning to finally do a public Early Access release on the 18th of April. It will have a release on both Steam and GOG, so everyone should be able to get stuck into it. Find out more about the upcoming release here.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

As my blog as FSFE Fellow No. 1 is temporarily not aggregated on planet.kde.org and my private blog about woodwork (German only) currently only tells about a wooden staircase (but soon again about wooden jewelry) I’m building I found a new place for my KDE (non-Randa) related stuff: KDE Blogs. Thanks to the KDE Sysadmin team for the quick setup!

Mario Fux is looking to drive some new life into Simon speech recognition for KDE. For getting things going, Mario is looking at doing a final release of Simon that uses kdelibs4 and Qt4, following that the development focus will shift to making use of KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5. There are already commits since 2013 to the KDE4/Qt4 version of Simon, warranting a release.

Following the 5th release 5.4.0 published in January 2017, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.5.0 of digiKam Software Collection. As 5.4.0, this version introduces again several improvements in database interface.

This time, Mario Frank has significantly improved the threads management done in background to prevent an overload of the computer under intensive workload by batch processing of items. The maintenance now does not generate massive amounts of threads anymore. Instead, we use a queue based approach to level the load on the CPUs more appropriately. This should improve the re-activeness during maintenance.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

This year, the GNOME project’s annual European conference will be taking place in Manchester, UK. Happening between 28th July and 2nd August, it will be the biggest and most important GNOME event of 2017. The conference will provide an opportunity to find out about the latest technical developments, learn new skills and tools, attend talks and participate in workshops and discussions. Everyone is welcome to attend – see the GUADEC 2017 website for more details.

Alex Larsson from the Flatpak project, an open-source initiative to offer a universal binary format for all GNU/Linux distributions, announced the availability of Flatpak 0.8.4.

Coming about three weeks after the release of Flatpak 0.8.4, this update includes fixes for various crashes reported by users since Flatpak 0.8.3 or a previous version, as well as documentation improvements. It also addresses the xauth propagation, which some users reported broken.

There are plenty of efforts to provide automated GUI testing, this is another one working in my case, I would like to share. It is written in Vala, is a GTK+ library with just one top window, you can attach your widget to test, can add test cases, check status and finish by calling asserts. Feel free to ask any thing you need or add issues, in order to improve it.

Recently, I was asked by my fellow GNOME friends to write how did I transitioned from nothing to a GNOME contributor. The intention is to motivate people to engage. I don’t think my story is that exciting, but, well, why not? If someone gets motivated and start contributing, goal achieved. But beware: there ain’t any TL;DR here. it’s just a long story.

New Releases

4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informed Softpedia about the availability of the Beta release of his upcoming 4MLinux 22.0 operating system, but only the Core edition for now.

When it launches later this year, the 4MLinux 22.0 Core will be the basic version of the 4MLinux 22.0 operating system. The Beta version allows public testers to get an early taste of what’s coming in this release, and it ships with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and open source applications.

There seems to be no shortage of Linux distributions specifically designed and built for security researchers. That list includes the Parrot Security OS Linux distribution, which was updated to version 3.5 on March 8. The Parrot Security OS platform is based on the Debian Linux distribution, with the open-source MATE desktop the default choice for new users. As a platform for security researchers, Parrot Security OS provides a wide array of tools that fit into different categories, including information gathering, vulnerability analysis, database assessment, exploitation tools, password attacks, wireless testing, digital forensics, reverse engineering and reporting tools. One of its more interesting tools is the open-source Kayak car hacking tool that can be used to diagnose a car’s CAN (Controller Area Network) bus. In addition, version 3.5 includes the CryptKeeper encrypted folder manager tool, as well as the Metasploit penetration testing framework, which is packed full with 1,627 exploits. For users who want to stay somewhat anonymous while using the system, anonymous web surfing tools are also included in the Linux distribution. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the Parrot Security OS 3.5 release.

A Phoronix reader pointed out an interesting reference on a Mesa patch today… Tom Stellard, the former GSoC student who was instrumental in developing the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, is now working for Red Hat.

When building out a storage solution you have a choice between vendor lock-in and the options that open source offers.

“Choice” is one of the most sought-after values in IT management. Most IT managers want to create and maintain agile environments where they can quickly flex and change to adapt to the emerging needs of their business.

Choice, however, can be a double-edged sword. While in one way it cuts through delay and inertia to enable great responsiveness, in another way it can easily demand more resources, which often means additional expense.

Finance

Norges Bank bought a new stake in shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) during the fourth quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The institutional investor bought 1,652,669 shares of the open-source software company’s stock, valued at approximately $115,191,000. Norges Bank owned approximately 0.93% of Red Hat as of its most recent SEC filing.

Fedora

Last weekend the Fedora Project was present at the Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2017. This was my last stop during my trip to Nullcon 2017 and the Amrita University. This year’s presence of Fedora at the CLT wouldn’t be possible without the help of Robert, Stephan, and Miro.

Canonical/Ubuntu

On April 25th, Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS will no longer be supported by Canonical. Why? That is the 5 year anniversary of the release, which is the amount of support time given to an LTS (Long Term Support) version of the Linux distribution.

For many home users, this really doesn’t matter, as they have probably already upgraded to a newer version. Unfortunately, some businesses do not upgrade as regularly. In fact, some organizations may not be ready to move on from Ubuntu 12.04. Tough luck? Not at all. Today, Canonical introduces Ubuntu Linux 12.04 ESM. This “Extended Security Maintenance” release is not free, however — organizations must pay for the extended support.

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has shared a few details about getting Mir 1.0 ready for release.

Long story short, they are expecting to officially release Mir 1.0 with an ABI guarantee early in the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle. It’s yet to be firmly decided whether there will be one major release before going to v1.0 (it would be v0.27), but it’s looking like not too far after Ubuntu 17.04 is released next month, we could see Mir 1.0 declared.

After Arrow revealed plans to follow up on its Qualcomm-backed DragonBoard 410C SBC with three more Linux ready, open spec 96Boards SBCs, one of the boards — the Chameleon96 — has been detailed on RocketBoards.org. The Cyclone V based, 85 x 54mm Chameleon96, which is the first 96Boards form factor SBC to include an FPGA, was also announced by SecureRF, which is offering its quantum-resistant cryptography technology on the board (see farther below).

In Greek mythology, the story of Charon, the ferryman, goes like this: to cross the river Styx to the underworld, souls needed Charon’s guidance. Those who did not get his help were forced to wander the shores, lost for a hundred years.

One of the leading items on embedded developers’ to-do lists these days is to add Amazon’s Alexa voice agent to a hacker board or another Linux device. Of course, you could simply buy an Alexa-enabled Amazon Echo speaker system for $180 — or a non-speaker Amazon Echo Dot for only $50 — but what fun is that? For some, the goal is to recreate the basic Alexa Skills of ordering pizza or asking random question like which countries were finalists in the 2014 World Cup. Others want to go a step further and use Alexa to voice activate robots, smart home devices, dashboard interfaces, and other gizmos using technologies like MQTT. From a hacking perspective, the first stage is easy, said PTR Group CTO and Chief Scientist Mike Anderson at Embedded Linux Conference 2017 in February.

VersaLogic has continued its line of Linux-friendly, zoologically named PC/104 SBCs with the Lion, which takes on Intel’s latest 7th Generation Core “Kaby Lake” U-series processor. This is the first Kaby Lake based PC/104 board we’ve seen, and the first to offer the OneBank extension scheme. Other PCe/104 OneBank boards include VersaLogic’s Bay Trail Atom based Bengal, as well as Diamond Systems’s Atom N2800 based Atlas and WinSystems’s Apollo Lake Atom based PX1-C415.

While the Raspberry Pi is an excellent and affordable mini Linux computer with a stylish and functional desktop user interface, it has plenty of scope beyond that of a regular PC. Here’s an overview of the physical computing capabilities of the Pi.

FriendlyElec (FriendlyARM) has added to its line of tiny, open spec NanoPi Neo SBCs with a Neo2 model that advances to an ARMv8 architecture. Whereas the similarly 40 x 40mm NanoPi Neo and wireless-enabled NanoPi Neo Air run Ubuntu Core on a quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 clocked to 1.2GHz, the NanoPi Neo2 moves up to a quad-core, Cortex-A53 Allwinner H5. The A5, which is also found on the Orange Pi PC 2 hacker SBC, is joined by a higher-end Mali-450 GPU. No clock rate is specified.

Before Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone was the go-to low-cost developer board for enthusiasts. It’s still used by many, and a new BeagleBone board is now being targeted at robots.

The US $79.95 BeagleBone Blue from BeagleBoard.org is a credit-card sized board with all the components needed to operate a robot or even a drone. It is open source, as its schematics have been published, and developers can replicate the board.

BeagleBoard.org’s $80 “BeagleBone Blue” robotics SBC runs Debian on an Octavo SiP, and adds motion control and battery friendly power to the BB Black.

BeagleBoard.org first showed off a prototype of its robotics-targeted, community backed BeagleBone Blue back in Jan. 2016. The BeagleBone Black spin-off was designed and developed in coordination with the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, and has been tested by hundreds of students. BeagleBoard.org has now launched the open-spec, Linux-driven SBC with Arrow, Element14, and Mouser offering prices ranging from $80 to $82.

The latest Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch is the Tag Heuer Connected Modular 45. It continues the dubious traditions of word salad branding and smartwatches that cost an arm and a leg, in this case $1,600. That’s $100 more than 2015’s Tag Heuer Connected, but what’s a Benjamin between low-tier luxury watch friends?

That’s according to web analytics company StatCounter, which found last week that Windows held 38.6% market share in terms of worldwide OS internet usage while Android came in at 37.4%, within striking distance of surpassing Windows for the first time ever.

Mirantis is (or, as we will see, was) known as the pure play OpenStack vendor. The company focused on offering large organizations products and services that helped them leverage the open-source, OpenStack cloud computing platform to build their own clouds for internal or external use.

Over time, however, there has been some doubt cast upon how much of a market opportunity there is for these sort of OpenStack service providers. The OpenStack ecosystem has been the source of much angst as consolidation, rationalization and unrealized hopes and dreams too their toll.

Next-generation data center networking is being driven by open source hardware and software initiatives that are often led by web titans like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, according to a new report from SDxCentral.

These web companies are crucial because they can handle the processing, networking, and storage capacity required to serve millions to billions of users, according to SDxCentral’s Next Gen Data Center Networking Report. As a result, these companies and others have moved from proprietary networking devices, to open and streamlined hardware based on merchant silicon, the report says.

Initially one of the main driving forces behind this IoT revolution was the open source community whose constant experimentation, combined with accelerating technological possibilities, created many new and interesting applications. These applications range from Wi-Fi kettles to smart data analysing machines and everything in between.

CBR lists some of the best open source software tools for IoT development.

At first glance, the question seems a little silly. After all, cloud computing and open source have both experienced surges in use to the point where nearly every company on the planet uses both. And many analysts suggest that neither one would have experienced their current level of growth without the other.

Benjamin Franklin was known to say, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” There are open source solutions for completing your taxes, such as Open Tax Solver, but what about the other side of that quote? What does open source have to do with death? It’s quite a lively subject, it seems. I know you are just dying to know, so let’s dig in.

We all experience death and it becomes a long drawn out process of paperwork and burial rituals that we hope doesn’t weigh too much on the loved ones we’ve left behind. The open source community has given this process some thought, not surprisingly. They’ve lent their mindshare towards rethinking how to deal with that final episode of life. It turns out, not only is open source great in life, but it comes in handy in death, too.

The Idaho National Laboratory has released a new open-source tool for software developers. The Continuous Integration, Verification, Enhancement and Testing tool, or Civet for short, is the latest INL software to be released free to the public on the lab’s GitHub website.

Idaho National Laboratory recently released a new open-source tool for software developers. The Continuous Integration, Verification, Enhancement and Testing tool, or Civet for short, is the latest INL software to be released free to the public on the lab’s GitHub website. INL hopes to collaborate with the public to refine this high-quality tool and to improve the productivity of software developers who use it.

If you’re reading this article, it’s almost a certainty your business uses open source software. The web hosting industry is one of the foremost beneficiaries of the open source movement. Linux, GNU, MySQL, Apache, PHP, Python, and WordPress — all fruits of open source development that have been embraced by web hosting companies to build products and services. The benefits of using open source software are obvious, but what’s often not so obvious is why web hosts and solution providers should start their own open source projects.

I’m not talking about giants like Red Hat, Google, and even Microsoft. Their motivations for creating open source projects are clear. Nor am I talking about making the occasional contribution to existing projects — most developers in the industry will make a pull request from time-to-time.

Events

“Virtual reality (VR) is nothing new — people have been experimenting with it for decades. But only recently, we have come to terms with having commercial hardware like Oculus or HTC Vive to experience and enjoy VR content within our home,” says Rabimba Karanjai, a full-time graduate researcher and Mozilla contributor, who will be speaking about virtual reality development at the upcoming Open Networking Summit.

I haven’t written a post for some time now, been busy creating something very special which i hope to share about really soon. I usually write in this blog about technical things, and i will continue to do this after this post but i wanted to share some of the insights i gained both from being a returning speaker and track chair in the recent OpenStack summits.

Do you have an interesting use case around Xen Project technology or best practices around the community? There’s a wide variety of topics we are looking for, including security, embedded environments, network function virtualization (NFV), and more. You can find all the suggested topics for presentations and panels here (make sure you select the Topics tab).

This year’s Akademy will be held at the Universidad de Almería (UAL) in Almería, Spain, from July 22nd to 27th.

The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE Community to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.

This year Akademy is being organized together with UNIA and HackLab Almería. Together they have organized various free software events including the successful PyConEs 2016

Jörg’s Audit +++ was placed on Wednesday and Thursday including the option to do the OPSE certification. So we spend most of Monday and Tuesday preparing the session and the infrastructure. I built the test environment in the past years. For this issue of the training I switched to OpenStack because the deployment process is faster than the old way with Ansible. In the end I was running a mixture of a classic libvirt setup and OpenStack side by side. The problem was that running Debian 3.x, CentOS 4, and an old release of pfSense doesn’t really work with a tool like OpenStack. To show old vulnerabilities and the difference to a brand-new distribution I still like to use the ancient distributions.

China Telecom (CT) was approved as the newest OpenStack Gold Member at the Foundations November 2016 board meeting.

China Telecom joins some of the leading technology companies in the world ? including Inspur, Cisco, Dell EMC, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, NEC and Symantec ? as one of 24 founding Gold Members.

Databases

In an ever-changing world, the data surrounding relational and non-relational databases is no different. While there are proponents for both, it seems to be a case by case basis for which is best for a particular environment. And, with the pace of innovation, the answer can be swayed on a frequent basis. With all that being said, the numbers don’t lie, and there is evidence of a shift that is occurring.

While most of the stalwart SQL related databases (MSSQL, Oracle RDBMS, DB2, etc.) remain stagnant, there has been a decline in interest for MySQL. Might seem surprising given the fact that one of the core components of the original LAMP stack is losing ground. How could that be the case? In essence, a lot has changed since it came into prominence. Most importantly, in my opinion, is that it was purchased by Oracle. No longer an independent entity, you have one company controlling two prominent database choices. Is it possible for Oracle to be unbiased and treat each on its own merits? Perhaps. Only the folks inside the company know the true answer to that. Whatever the answer may be, it goes without question that the momentum that MySQL once had has been subdued.

Henrik Johansson, senior developer at Eniro, gives a glowing review of the ScyllaDB database system for its part of a microservice-based pipeline used at the Swedish search and directory assistance company where he works.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Addressing the complexity of chaining together all the moving parts required to get a React Native project built and running, the open source community has published a starter app to smooth the process.

The new Create React Native App (CRNA) project, now on GitHub, was announced in a blog post today by Adam Perry, a developer at Expo, the new name (as of last week) for Exponent, which provides a React Native-based cross-platform to develop mobile apps purely with JavaScript.

BSD

Hans Wennborg has announced the release of LLVM 4.0 and connected sub-projects like Clang 4.0. LLVM/Clang 4.0 is a big update to this open-source compiler infrastructure stack and also marks the change to their new versioning scheme.

For release highlights of LLVM/Clang 4.0, see our feature overview for the advancements made to this compiler stack over the past half-year. LLVM 4.0 was supposed to ship back in February but bugs had dragged out the release until today.

Since January there’s been Zen tuning in LLVM Clang with the “znver1″ flag, similar to the znver1 tuning in GCC that’s been in place since 2015. While LLVM Clang 4.0 has the initial znver1 support, it’s incomplete.

In LLVM/Clang 4.0 and currently in SVN/Git master, znver1 is relying upon the btver1 scheduler model. Btver1 is for AMD’s Bobcat.

pfSense software version 2.3.3-p1 is now available! This is a maintenance/errata patch available by running an update from an existing installation and it does not have a standalone installer to download.

Rubicon Communications’ Jim Pingle is announcing the availability of the pfSense 2.3.3-p1 maintenance update to the world’s most trusted open source firewall based on BSD technologies.

pfSense 2.3.3-p1 appears to be a small point release that includes an up-to-date base system updated to the FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p17 build, fixing the CVE-2016-7055, CVE-2017-3731, and CVE-2017-3732 vulnerabilities. It also includes a total of nineteen security/bug fixes, especially for cURL, which was updated to version 7.53.0 to fix CVE-2017-2629, and OpenSSL.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

Technology is complex, and becoming even more so. It used to be that a company could get by with just a few smart people in their tech department. Now, creating and managing tech solutions on an enterprise scale is beyond the power of even the most talented people. As such, industry giants and smaller players alike are converging their compute, networking and storage technologies with common hardware and open standards.

Swedish inventor Torbjørn Ludvigsen has spent the last three years developing a new kind of large-format 3D printer that can build furniture-sized objects in any room — surprisingly easily and relatively cheaply. Ludvigsen’s invention, the Hangprinter, employs a system of wires and computer-controlled pulleys anchored to the walls, floor, and ceiling. Once installed, the Hangprinter essentially uses the room itself as a casing.

Facilitating an event where people are looking to have a productive conversation or experience isn’t possible without preparation. You need to plan—with the understanding that nothing will happen unless you create a safe space for people to participate.

Science

The vaccine production facilities of the Danish State Serum Institute (SSI) have been sold to Aljomaih Group, which is owned by a Saudi family dynasty with alleged extremist links. Previously Aljomaih Group, which is led by Sheikh Abdul Aziz Hamad Aljomaih, had given donations to the Muslim Brotherhood …
To make matters worse, the new owners are advocates of Sharia law and employ people who had previously encouraged a boycott of Denmark.

Health/Nutrition

There has been a lot of noise lately about the GOP health care plan (AHCA) and the differences to the current plan (ACA or Obamacare). A lot of statistics are being misinterpreted.

The New York Times has an excellent analysis of some of this. But to pick it apart, I want to highlight a few things:

Many Republicans are touting the CBO’s estimate that, some years out, premiums will be 10% lower under their plan than under the ACA. However, this carries with it a lot of misleading information.

[...]

So, to sum up: the reason that insurance premiums under the GOP plan will rise at a slightly slower rate long-term is that the higher-risk people will be unable to afford insurance in the first place, leaving only the cheaper people to buy in.

Security

With the Internet of Things already flexing its muscle and showing its potential to be a security nightmare, has the time come for governments to step into the fray and begin regulating the Internet? Security guru Bruce Schneier thinks that may be an inevitability, and says the development community might want to go ahead and start leading the way to assure that regulations aren’t put in place by people who don’t understand tech.

“As everything turns into a computer, computer security becomes ‘everything security,’” he explained, “and there are two very important ramifications of that. The first is that everything we know about computer security becomes applicable to everything. The second is the restrictions and regulations that the real world puts on itself are going to come into our world, and I think that has profound implications for us in software and especially in open source.”

All of those running ioquake3-powered games are encouraged to update their engine installation as soon as possible.

The developers behind this popular fork of the open-source id Tech 3 engine code have pushed a “large security fix” and all users are encouraged to upgrade prior to connecting to any online servers. Unfortunately, ioquake3 currently doesn’t have any auto-update system to make it easy to roll out game engine updates.

SCAP stands for Security Content Automation Protocol. It is an open standard which defines methods for security policy compliance, vulnerability management and measurement etc. This article focuses on the operating system compliance part of SCAP.

It comes originally from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide a way for US government agencies to audit its systems for regulatory compliance.

Defence/Aggression

A pro-Islamic channel, Al Hindi on Telegram, an encrypted chat platform, has praised Mohammad Saifullah, encountered in Lucknow terror operation as a ‘soldier of Khilafah from India’ and incited Muslims to follow his example and launch lone-wolf attacks

To get an idea of how hard servers at different types of restaurants have to work to earn minimum wage — and how volatile tipped incomes can be — we modeled the hourly wages for servers at four restaurants from publicly owned companies based on average check costs per customer, as disclosed in the companies’ securities filings.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

What if it’s not incompetence? What if it is by design? What if President Donald Trump has decided American doesn’t really need a Department of State and if he can’t get away with closing it down, he can disable and defund it?

The only problem is Trump will quickly find out he’ll have to reluctantly keep a few lights on at Foggy Bottom.

Things do not look good for State. There were no press briefings between Trump taking office on January 20 and some irregular gatherings beginning in early March. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wasn’t seen at several White House meetings where foreign leaders were present, and has taken only two very short trips abroad. Of the 13 sets of official remarks he has given, 10 have been perfunctory messages to countries on their national days, with one speech to his own employees. Sources inside State say he is nowhere to be seen around the building, either in person or bureaucratically via tasking orders and demands for briefings.

Censorship/Free Speech

EDRi has signed a joint open letter together with 27 other civil society organisations expressing concerns about European Commission’s copyright proposal. The proposal requires internet platforms to use automated upload filtering technologies. This obligation would impact negatively on free speech and democracy by building a system where citizens will face internet platforms blocking the upload of their content, even if it is a perfectly legal use of copyrighted content.

Over the years, Telegram has helped quench Iranians’ thirst for online political expression in a country where Twitter and Facebook are banned. But leading up to Iran’s presidential election in May, Telegram is now seen by some as a force that’s stifling political speech.

That’s because in recent months Iranian security and intelligence agencies have begun arresting Telegram users and now require those who run popular Telegram channels to apply for permits — disclosing their identities.

For years we’ve pointed out that UK libel law, in particular, was horrible and easily abused to chill speech. Things appear to have gotten somewhat better — as some really bad cases at least made people realize that some of the more extreme issues needed to be fixed, but on the whole, UK libel law is still incredibly broad, and can and does stifle speech (and, yes, I know, the UK doesn’t have the same free speech protections as the US does — but it should). This latest case is just a good example of why the UK’s standards for libel are so problematic.

The story involves two columnist/writers in the UK who got into a bit of a Twitter spat. Part of the problem, here, is that a lot of people have very strong emotional opinions about at least one of the parties in the lawsuit. Katie Hopkins has made a name for herself saying outrageous things and has been referred to, multiple times, as a professional troll. There are lots of people who dislike her, and certainly are quite happy to see that she’s come out the big loser in this libel dispute. But before you celebrate, the details here are important, and quite worrisome, if you support freedom of expression.

Literature was the first field to be affected by Russia’s political changes in the beginning of the nineties after the authorities granted liberty of expression and restricted the roles of government and factional censorship.

These changes came in line with the Russian community’s need to read banned works of Soviet writers. Some of those writers published their books while in asylum in the West after being accused of national betrayal. At that time, Soviet citizens were banned from traveling abroad unless in special cases, which made them also crave western literature banned under the propaganda of the communist authority.

Anyone with the slightest understanding of rhetoric will know that insults are rarely persuasive. Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment was hardly likely to endear her to wavering voters. Likewise, when decent people with genuine misgivings about the European Union were smeared as racist in the run-up to the referendum, a victory for the Leave campaign was secured.

[...]

It is difficult to feel anything but contempt for this kind of behaviour, coming as it does from some of the most privileged members of society. The same can be said for the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford University, where a group of students declared that the statue of the colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College made them feel ‘unsafe’, and called for the Grade II* listed building to be irrevocably changed.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas today presented draft legislation to whack social media providers for what the minister described as reluctance to take down hate speech and fake news.

Social media providers, according to the draft, would have to take down clearly illegal content within 24 hours and illegal content in 7 days along with with any potential copies of the respective contents. All taken down content would have to be stored as evidence and users would have to be informed about the action.

Can an injunction be sought against an access provider that would require this to block access not to a website [as per the standard scenario] but rather streaming servers giving unauthorised access to copyright content? Can such an injunction consist of a ‘live’ blocking, ie a block limited to when the relevant content is being streamed?

An application of this kind was recently and successfully made – for the first time as far as the UK is concerned – by the Football Association Premier League (FAPL, supported by other rightholders) against 6 main retail internet service providers (ISPs).

Like many bad laws, I’m sure this bill lying on the Utah governor’s desk has its heart in the right place. But, like many bad laws, its head is completely up its ass. Eugene Volokh reports there’s Yet Another Cyberbullying Bill on the threshold of passage. Like many that have come before it, it’s full of constitutional issues and easily-abusable language.

The problem with bad laws (well, ONE problem) is they’ll need to be enforced at some point. Legislators pass laws out of fear, boredom, or a desire to look busy. They’ll pass laws to push personal agendas and closely-held beliefs. They’ll pass laws in response to bizarre tragedies so unique they can’t be found in expanded actuarial tables or at the behest of favored industry leaders. Every so often, they’ll even pass laws citizens are demanding. But far too often, they’ll just pass laws because they’re legislators and it’s right there in the job description.

The Two Sessions in Beijing offer an annual chance for delegates to China’s top legislative and advisory political assemblies to present their own policy suggestions. On March 1, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference vice-chairman Luo Fuhe issued a proposal, translated in full at CDT, for speeding up access to foreign websites. “While we agree that the monitoring and blocking of foreign websites cannot be neglected as part of government efforts to protect the nation’s peace and stability,” Luo wrote, “we must also note that many foreign sites are not political.” He complained of the scientific and economic cost of current internet controls, citing long load times for some valuable sites and the unreliable VPNs or even foreign travel to which many researchers resort. His suggested remedies included a general unblocking of academic and scientific resources, and greater clarity around remaining controls with the compilation of an authoritative list of “negative foreign sites.” Even in the case of news, he added, information should not be blocked simply because it is “contested.”

During a Feb. 27 hearing involving the constitutionality of a state social media law, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that Twitter and Facebook had become, and even surpassed, the public square as a place for discussion and debate.

Privacy/Surveillance

While Amazon’s fight has been rendered moot, this case lays groundwork for some tough and important conversations to come, raising a slew of fascinating questions around the technologies. What do devices like the Echo or Google Home actually record and save? Have we, as consumers, effectively surrendered a reasonable right to privacy from corporations and the government by bringing such devices into our home?

Back in October ACLU, for example, revealed that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter had been passing on users personals to Geofeedia, a shady outfit that provides law enforcement with details on potential activists, or more precisely, according to ACLU, “activists of colour”.

While Facebook has made steps to stop developers using data for such things, it’s unlikely going to get a thumbs up from the coalition, which has called on Facebook to proactively enforce the policy, rather than relying on automatic detection and reports from users when it messes up.

Once paired to a smartphone via Bluetooth, the jacket allows the wearer to control key functions with just a brush or tap of the cuff. A double tap with two fingers, for example, starts or stops music.

President Donald Trump picked a National Security Agency official to lead White House cybersecurity policy issues during a time when NSA surveillance powers are up for discussion and bad blood exists between the NSA and industry.

A contentious piece of U.S. law giving the National Security Agency broad authority to spy on people overseas expires at the end of the year. Expect heated debate about the scope of U.S. surveillance law leading up to Dec. 31.

One major issue to watch involves the way the surveillance treats communications from U.S. residents. Critics say U.S. emails, texts, and chat logs — potentially millions of them — are caught up in surveillance authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The Constitution — which has always been malleable when national security interests are in play — simply no longer applies at our nation’s borders. Despite the Supreme Court’s finding that cell phone searches require warrants, the DHS and CBP have interpreted this to mean it doesn’t apply to searches of devices entering/leaving the country.

For the past 15 years, the government has won 9/10 constitutional-violation edge cases if they occurred within 100 miles of our borders — a no man’s land colloquially referred to as the “Constitution-free zone.” But the pace of device searches has increased exponentially over the last couple of years. The “border exception” is no longer viewed as an “exception” — something to be deployed only when customs officers had strong suspicions about a person or their devices. Now, it’s the rule, as NBC News reports.

Documents purportedly outlining a massive CIA surveillance program suggest that CIA agents must go to great lengths to circumvent encryption they can’t break. In many cases, physical presence is required to carry off these targeted attacks.

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul was asked about President Trump’s accusation that President Obama ordered the NSA to wiretap his calls. The Kentucky senator expressed skepticism about the mechanics of Trump’s specific charge, saying: “I doubt that Trump was a target directly of any kind of eavesdropping.” But he then made a broader and more crucial point about how the U.S. government spies on Americans’ communications — a point that is deliberately obscured and concealed by U.S. government defenders.

The two Arkansas cops who were so offended by a 79-year old legislator named John Walker who championed people’s Constitutional right to record police that they arrested him for recording a traffic stop.

Fortunately for law enforcement officers (but not so much for lowly citizens), courts have routinely affirmed that officers don’t need to know the laws they’re enforcing to stay in the law enforcement business. No one expects cops to be legal scholars, but the least they could do is get a second opinion when they’re faced with a situation where applicable laws may — or just as frequently, may not — exist.

We’ve seen nonexistent laws abused before. Most of the time, a perceived moving violation acts as the groundwork for a fishing expedition. This is fine, sayeth the courts. Other times, nonexistent laws are cited to shut down photographers or harass people otherwise minding their own business.

What’s a few typos between you and a friend a few cops? Nothing, really. The lives they ruin will not be their own.

UK resident Nigel Lang lost more than two years of his life to a typo. He was never jailed, but the life he lived was bereft of freedom. Thanks to the addition of a single wrong digit, Lang’s house was raided, his electronics seized, and his life’s goals rerouted.

[...]

It took more than a year before anyone would even entertain the idea that some error might have been made. At first, Lang, who is black, suspected this wrongful arrest might have been racially-motivated. But the IP address mistakenly entered by law enforcement was registered to his partner, who is white. He then tried to get to the bottom of why police had targeted him in the first place. If anyone wonders why so few complaints against law enforcement result in punishment, here’s part of the answer: the complaint process is unofficially discouraged by officers and staff.

You think prosecutors search for the truth? The Department of Justice rewards its prosecutors for convictions, not exonerations. The government agent who conducted our investigation said “it’s not my job to make the defense’s argument” when interviewing witnesses. A senior government lawyer publicly boasted that our case was “hand-picked” by prosecutors who “went on the offensive” because they had such a strong case. Search for the truth be damned.

Last year, 19-year-old UK student Josh Browder released a chatbot called “DoNotPay” that assisted drivers in challenging parking tickets. It was a small program with a huge upside. The bot’s legal guidance — in the form of yes/no questions — resulted in more than $4 million in tickets being dismissed.

Chatbots are no replacement for lawyers, but almost no one seeks legal help when dealing with parking tickets. That’s probably why law/traffic enforcement agencies feel comfortable issuing so many bogus ones. DoNotPay not only saved UK residents millions of dollars, it also proved the ticketing system was fundamentally broken. More than 64% of the 250,000 tickets challenged were overturned.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is about how massive, giant internet access providing monopolists and duopolists want to double dip and double charge for the value provided at the endpoints, rather than being satisfied with getting paid for the value they provide in connecting the end points. The issue has nothing to do with millions of people rushing through a “pipeline” that was built for “maybe a dozen people” and somehow “ruining lawns” (?!?) while doing so. Nothing in net neutrality has anything to do with over-clogging local pipes. In fact, it allows for standard network management. And again, going back years and years and years, internet backbone experts have pointed out that there’s capacity to spare. There are no ruined lawns. There are no distraught home owners wishing to “talk a lot” to their 11 closest neighbors, dismayed that a million people are trampling their lawns.

Pai also said he would “absolutely” operate independently of the White House, but Democrats questioned whether he will really do so in their letter Friday.

“While you have long claimed to be an advocate for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment, your silence on the matter and refusal to take a stand against threats levied at the media is troubling given your regulatory and oversight role over the industry,” the Democrats wrote. “Moreover, such a lack of response could call into question the ongoing independence of the FCC under your watch.”

Intellectual Monopolies

MacroSolve’s actions soon made it part of a longstanding debate in the tech industry over “patent trolls,” companies that do little or no business other than filing patent lawsuits. But MacroSolve management never accepted the idea that the company was a “troll,” and it said so in interviews.

“If you enforce your rights, you’re a troll,” MacroSolve CEO Jim McGill said in a 2014 interview with Ars Technica. “If you don’t, big companies will walk all over you.”

Trademarks

Thru, Inc. made a mess of its registered trademark by allowing it to lie dormant. It registered “Thru Dropbox” but made no attempt to challenge Dropbox’s application for the term “DROPBOX” in 2009. Instead, it sat back and watched as Dropbox grabbed market share. Five years after it filed its application, the trademark was awarded to Dropbox. Only then did Thru, Inc. act, so to speak. It acted like the horrified victim of Dropbox’s motion for declaratory judgment, one that would uncontestably award the “Dropbox” registration solely to the cloud storage service. Thru countersued, claiming infringement. Bad move.

Copyrights

In Australia, however, the situation is less certain. Due to what some believe amounts to a drafting error in Australia’s implementation of the Australia – US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), so-called safe harbor provisions only apply to commercial Internet service providers.

This means that while local ISPs such as Telstra receive protection from copyright infringement complaints, places like schools, universities, museums, libraries and archives do not.

Back in September last year, Mike wrote about the remarkable court ruling in India that copyright is not inevitable, divine or a natural right. As we have been reporting since 2013, the case in question was brought by three big Western publishers against Delhi University and a photocopy shop over “course packs” — bound collections of photocopied extracts from books and journals that are sold more cheaply than the sources. Although the High Court of Delhi ruled that photocopying textbooks in this way is fair use, that was not necessarily the end of the story: the publishers might have appealed to India’s Supreme Court.

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What Else is New

The latest tactics of the patent microcosm are just about as distasteful as last month's (or last year's), with focus shifting to the courts and few broadly-misinterpreted patent cases (mainly Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix)

The fightback against Section 101 and the US Supreme Court (notably Alice) seems to concentrate on old and new buzzwords, such as "Software as a Medical Device" ("SaMD") or "Fourth Industrial Revolution" ("4IR"), which the EPO recently paid European media to spread and promote

Infomercials are still dominant among news about patents, in effect drowning out the signal (real journalism) and instead pushing agenda that is detached from reality, pertinent facts, objective assessment, public interest and so on

A discussion about the infamous abundance of patent cases in the Eastern District of Texas (TXED/EDTX) and what this will mean for businesses that have branches or any form of operations there (making them subjected to lawsuits in that district even after TC Heartland)

The patent microcosm is so eager to stop the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that it's supporting sham deals (or "scams") and exploits/distorts the voice of the new USPTO Director to come up with PTAB-hostile catchphrases

Judgmental patent maximalists are still respecting high courts only when it suits them; whenever the outcome is not desirable they're willing to attack the legitimacy of the courts and the competence of judges, even resorting to racist ad hominem attacks if necessary

With or without the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which is the wet dream of patent trolls and their legal representatives, the EPO's terrible policies have landed a lot of low-quality patents on the hands of patent trolls (many of which operate through city-states that exist for tax evasion -- a fiscal environment ripe for shells)

The money-obsessed, money-printing patent office, where the assembly line mentality has been adopted and patent-printing management is in charge, is devaluing or diluting the pool of European Patents, more so with restrictions (monetary barriers) to challenging bad patents

he media in Europe continues to be largely apathetic towards the EPO crisis, instead relaying a bunch of press releases and doctored figures from the EPO; only blogs that closely follow EPO scandals bothered mentioning the new petition

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) sees the number of filings up to an almost all-time high and efforts to undermine PTAB are failing pretty badly -- a trend which will be further cemented quite soon when the US Supreme Court (quite likely) backs the processes of PTAB

The EPO is trying very hard to silence not only the union but also staff representatives; it's evidently worried that the lies told by Team Battistelli will be refuted and morale be affected by reality